To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

As cause we often specify an event the occurrence of which first guaranteed that of the effect. This notion is explicated in a framework of branching worlds in Sections I to V. VI and VII point out its close relations to the concept of an agent's bringing about an event. The topic of the last two sections is the distinction between causes and necessary circumstances. For this purpose conditionals are used, interpreted with respect to branching worlds without a similarity relation (...) between them. (shrink)

T × W logic is a combination of tense and modal logic for worlds or histories with the same time order. It is the basis for logics of causation, agency and conditionals, and therefore an important tool for philosophical logic. Semantically it has been defined, among others, by R. H. Thomason. Using an operator expressing truth in all worlds, first discussed by C. M. Di Maio and A. Zanardo, an axiomatization is given and its completeness proved via D. Gabbay’s irreflexivity (...) lemma. Given this lemma the proof is more or less straight forward. At the end an alternative axiomatization is sketched in which Di Maio’s and Zanardo’s operator is replaced by a version of “actually”. (shrink)

T × W logic is a combination of tense and modal logic for worlds or histories with the same time order. It is the basis for logics of causation, agency and conditionals, and therefore an important tool for philosophical logic. Semantically it has been defined, among others, by R. H. Thomason. Using an operator expressing truth in all worlds, first discussed by C. M. Di Maio and A. Zanardo, an axiomatization is given and its completeness proved via D. Gabbay’s irreflexivity (...) lemma. Given this lemma the proof is more or less straight forward. At the end an alternative axiomatization is sketched in which Di Maio’s and Zanardo’s operator is replaced by a version of “actually”. (shrink)

Until quite recently, mind-body dualism has been regarded with deep suspicion by both philosophers and scientists. This has largely been due to the widespread identification of dualism in general with one particular version of it: the interactionist substance dualism of Réné Descartes. This traditional form of dualism has, ever since its first formulation in the seventeenth century, attracted numerous philosophical objections and is now almost universally rejected in scientific circles as empirically inadequate. During the last few years, however, renewed attention (...) has begun to be paid to the dualistic point of view, as a result of increasing discontent with the prevailing materialism and reductionism of contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. Awareness has grown that dualism need not be restricted to its traditional form and that other varieties of dualism are not subject to the difficulties commonly raised against Descartes' own version of it. -/- Interest in these alternative versions of dualism is growing fast today, because it seems that they are capable of capturing deep-seated philosophical intuitions, while also being fully consistent with the methodological assumptions and empirical findings of modern scientific work on the human mind and brain. The object of this book is to provide philosophers, scientists, their students, and the wider general public with an up-to-date overview of current developments in dualistic conceptions of the mind in contemporary philosophy and science. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to show that claims of supervenience of the mental upon the physical do not define substantial forms of materialism. While weak supervenience holds trivially, even strong supervenience does not justify a claim of identity, dependence or determination; it is only a relation between classifications of persons by psychological and physical properties.

The Parmenides is, especially with respect to its second part, one of Plato's most difficult dialogues. The paper sketches an interpretation which is characterized by the following main points: The interpretation is neither rejectionistic nor compatibilistic, that is, according to it, neither should none of the statements of the 2nd part be taken seriously as an assertion meant to be true, nor are all statements of the 2nd part acceptable as true if correctly interpreted. In the 2nd part of the (...) Parmenides, Plato develops a logical theory - a theory of predication, participation and of the community of ideal forms in general - on mereological foundations; in doing this, he advances far beyond elementary mereological principles. This forces us to revise our views concerning the beginnings of logic. It is due to the incomparably high rank which Plato accorded to the active working-out of insights that Plato presents his results not in an expository manner, but as a web of contradictions. The readers are challenged to find the truth for themselves. (shrink)